Progress ~ Chaos World ReduxChaos World# Posted on April 30th, 2018 11:45 AM by Gideon ZhiChaos World was one of the very first RPGs I worked on, and as a result the current patch isn´t quite up to standard; I had to cut down a *lot* of the text in order to fit the game script back in, and I never released it with a v1.0 status. Today I´m announcing that I still have Xeur´s original script before all the paring-down; with the help of TheMajinZenki I´ve mapped it to a new proper script dump and am preparing it for reinsertion. No new screenshots yet as it hasn´t gotten that far, but this is something I´m legitimately excited about and wanted to share the progress that has been made.

Progress ~ Yu Yu Haksuho Tokubetsu-HenYu Yu Hakusho: Tokubetsu-hen# Posted on April 23rd, 2018 12:01 PM by Gideon ZhiToday I´m providing a progress report for Yu Yu Hakusho: Tokubetsu-hen. The main script is translated and inserted, but there´s a lot of fiddly technical bits left. I´ve been slowly re-drawing the menu graphics (the text on the menu items is actually painted on; it´s not on a different layer so when it´s removed, whatever was supposed to have been underneath it needs to be filled in by hand) and working on the menus. The tournament mode has a few problems and the attract mode still needs to be done, but the project is in fairly good shape. I´ve replaced the screenshots on the project´s page to reflect the work that´s been done. No ETA though; other things are taking priority.

Progress ~ Monstania ReduxMonstania# Posted on April 16th, 2018 11:59 AM by Gideon ZhiMonstania was the very first translation patch of meaningful size that I released, and it is correspondingly more than a little creaky in a lot of ways. To that end I´ve spent some time reworking it. I´d like to be able to have user-entered 8-character names and it still has the weird soft-lock semi-hang bug that the original version has, but I´ve gotten the script completely retranslated (thanks again to TheMajinZenki, who did JoJo, SRW2, Magical Drop 2, and Masoukishin.) I´m attaching a couple of sample snapshots of current work to this news post, but as they don´t reflect the currently available patch I´m not going to add them to the project page. As with Lady Stalker, the Monstania redux´s future could go a number of ways; I´m not going to say much more here about it, other than that it´s amazing how simple this game is to work on now that I´ve got nearly 20 years of experience under my belt!

Progress ~ Magical Drop 2 Commercially AvailableMagical Drop 2# Posted on April 9th, 2018 11:33 AM by Gideon ZhiToday I´m going to be talking a bit about Magical Drop 2. The translation is complete and the game is now fully playable in English, end to end! But I´m not releasing it just yet, primarily because it is currently available for purchase - yes, with the English translation applied - as part of the Data East Classics Collection from Retro-bit. That´s right: we´ve been licensed! I´ve ticked the progress counter on the project page up to 99 (it doesn´t go any higher for projects without downloads) and updated the screenshots to showcase current work. From here I need to ask for some patience while I figure out where Magical Drop 2´s future lies.

Progress ~ Laplace´s Demon in Beta TestingLaplace´s Demon# Posted on April 5th, 2018 12:48 PM by Gideon ZhiLaplace´s Demon is a very strongly thematic game. Most years since its original release I´d think to myself, ´I should make sure to get this done for Halloween´ or ´Wouldn´t it be funny to release this on Valentine´s Day´ or something along those lines. The problem was that the thought would occur way too close to the holiday in question, and there was never enough time to fully fix the game in time. Then the holiday would pass, and Laplace would once again cease to be a priority.

I´m no longer aiming for a holiday-themed release for this. It´s been in playtesting for a while, and a second round is scheduled to start as soon as Masoukishin is done, but there are enough bugs in the original game that it can be kind of hard to tell if an issue is something caused by the translation or if it´s something that was always there. In the interests of personal sanity I´m not aiming to fix anything present in the original game, though the new version of the translation does look much nicer than the version I released back in the day. To that end I´ve completely replaced the screenshot slideshow on the project page with 15 fresh snaps showing the current state of the translation. I don´t think this one is very far off, though as usual I´m not going to commit to any given release date.

There´s an awful lot to talk about, an awful lot that´s happened in the last few years that the site has been silent. Some of that´s personal and isn´t really appropriate for this feed, but there´s a ton of news on a bunch of different projects that needs to get shared, and a number of pages on the site are a little creaky with age as well. So for the next little while I´ll be posting updates on Mondays and on Thursdays with project news, with site infrastructure updates as they occur.

For today, you´ll note that I´ve removed the "wanted" link from the hotbar; the information in it was old and misleading, it was an extremely manual process to keep it up to date, and in general it is no longer needed. I´ve replaced it with an invite link to the Aeon Genesis discord. The rules are basically the same as the forum rules.

Of particular note is that several years ago I set up a task and bug tracker, and I´ve grown to greatly appreciate tickets in the system for keeping track of what needs to be done on a given project. The task lists aren´t exhaustive (in particular, one game only has two tasks: "translate the script" and "insert the script") but more get added as projects mature. Additionally, any updates to tickets on public projects are echoed to a channel on the discord. Consider the site to be big-picture news, while the ticket feed is much more fine-grain. You won´t see individual bug fix updates on the website, but if you´re interested in following the day-to-day, the discord is the way to go.

Progress ~ Ladystalker UpdateLadystalker - The Apocalypse Engine# Posted on April 2nd, 2018 12:36 PM by Gideon ZhiToday on "things I haven´t talked about in a while", I want to highlight Ladystalker. Some progress has been made in formatting strings for line length, and most (but not all) of the interfaces have been hacked. I´ve also hacked the scrolling introduction. The work is currently imperfect (see "Lad" instead of "Lady" below) and probably two thirds or more of the game still remains to be checked for both line length and context. For a variety of reasons Ladystalker isn´t a priority at the moment, but I did want to drop a note to say progress is being made, if slowly, and that it hasn´t been forgotten about.

Release ~ Last Fighter Twin and Great Battle 5 v1.20The Great Battle 2 - Last Fighter Twin, The Great Battle 5# Posted on March 29th, 2018 12:51 PM by Gideon ZhiHi everyone, just dropping a quick note to say that Last Fighter Twin and The Great Battle 5 are up to v1.20. I´ve fixed an issue in LFT that caused the game to reset before the full ending could be displayed. TGB5´s title screen now works correctly if you hit start to skip the animation, and I´ve fixed the status bar palette (but made the font uglier in the process, an unfortunate but necessary tradeoff.) Enjoy!

Progress ~ Super Robot Wars Gaiden in BetaSuper Robot Wars Gaiden# Posted on March 28th, 2018 11:08 PM by Gideon ZhiHi everyone, I´m just dropping a note here to say that SRW Gaiden: Masoukishin/The Elemental Lords is currently being playtested. The screenshots on the project page were old, so I´ve replaced the lot of them with 21 fresh new snaps. I´m extremely pleased with how it looks, and even though it won´t be conveyed in screenshots I´m also exremely pleased with how it sounds, as we´ve got music persistence working in the game! The patch will be provided as an optional extra when release happens, and barring any major disasters that should be sometime in the next few months.

Last Fighter Twin, Great Battle 3, Great Battle 4, and Great Battle 5 have all had their patches updated. LFT´s update re-adds the cursor to the title screen and translates the 2P character select screen. GB3´s update fixes shops when playing with two players. GB4´s update fixes an AI bug that makes some fights harder than they should be. GB5´s update fixes a timing issue that caused only half of the title screen to render on hardware and more-accurate emulators.